What does "base" link mean here?
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On http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394, it says:
rel="canonical"
can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.Where would a document specify a base link? And how?
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I would always recommend when implementing canonical tags that you use an absolute links, which just means your entire url starting with http://
When they are talking about relative canonical links they mean relative to the "base" link, which could also be called the root of your website. So if your url was: http://www.rootdomain.com then your relative rel canonical tag would be
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A web page can provide a line of code in the area of the page which defines a base URL. Example:
<base href="http://www.mysite.com/">
The remaining links on the page will prepend non-absolute links with the base URL. If you wish to refer to a URL: "http://www.mysite.com/cars/ford/mustang" then you could simply use "cars/ford/mustang". This method is referred to as relative URLs. The URLs are relative to their base.
Offering the full URL is referred to as an absolute URL.
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